Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/505

 So??ie N'otcs on East African Folklore. 47 1

facts, if any, underlay this story. Mrs. H. R. Tate, wife of " Bwana Traill's" successor, kindly undertook to make inquiries for me at Malindi, but found that Dr. Maula Buksh had no recollection of the particular case in question, though there had been others. Mrs. Tate had heard of the incident, and told me that another man had had a similar fatal seizure at Takaungu, in December, 191 2, adding, " It often happens, as you probably know — it was just the same in Kikuyu."

As the tragedy thus seems to have been a real occurrence — probably on a par with many recorded cases of persons who have died through believing themselves bewitched — perhaps it should not have found a place here.

It is interesting, however, if unsatisfactory, through the absence of some important details and the impossibility of sifting the evidence. WJiy should the unfortunate man have imagined himself bewitched .'* We cannot answer, without knowing, first, whether the woman was a real person or a hallucination, and, secondly, what was the man's antecedent state of mind.

A local legend of old date is that of the " Seven Maidens," commemorated in the name Kwa Waanawali Sabaa, attached to a ruined town some miles north of Kipini. The story recalls Wordsworth's ballad of " The Seven Sisters, or the Solitude of Binnorie," and relates how, when the place was sacked by the Galla, seven little girls ran away, and finding their pursuers gaining on them, cried aloud, " Nti ataina, tupate kurigia tiati — Earth ! open and let us enter, that we may not fall into the hands of the Galla ! " So the earth opened and swallowed them, closing on the cloth worn by the last one, so that, when the Galla warriors came up, nothing was to be seen but "a fold of cloth" — npijuio zva kisutu (the narrator measured it on his fore-arm) — to tell the tale. A similar story (but evidently one quite distinct from this) is related by Captain Stigand {Laud of Zinj\ p. 33). The incident, according to his informant,